AARP Joins National Effort to Spot and Stop Scams

Some of the nation’s leading companies are joining with AARP to create a new weapon in the growing battle to stem scams that target older Americans.

The National Elder Fraud Coordination Center (NEFCC) is being funded with seed money from Amazon, Google, Walmart and AARP. Using the fraud-fighting expertise of these organizations, the center will help law enforcement contend with Americans’ losses to fraud, which reached as much as $158 billion in 2023. Of that amount, up to $61.5 billion was stolen from those 60 and older, according to a report by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

That volume of crime strains law enforcement agencies, says Kathy Stokes, director of AARP fraud prevention programs.

The new nonprofit NEFCC will help find the connections among fraud cases afflicting older Americans and share that analysis with law enforcement agencies to help them focus investigations across local and state lines.

“So, say, there are $10,000 cases all over the country on what would essentially be a grandparent scam, but [they’re] just going to sit there,” Stokes says, because they lack scale. “If you put them all together, all of a sudden, it’s a million-dollar-plus investigation and you’ve tied the cases together.”

Tracing those ties to criminals running the scams will fill a big gap in fighting fraud against older Americans, according to Brady Finta, NEFCC CEO and a former FBI supervisory special agent.

The goal is to eventually tackle scams before they harm anyone. “The idea is to begin to disrupt the fraud business model,” Stokes says. “It’s the start of something that will grow.”

NEFCC is set to begin its work by the end of April and will initially be housed within NCFTA, the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance headquarters in Pittsburgh—a nonprofit focused on thwarting cyberattacks.

About 42 percent of American adults have had a personal experience with fraud, a recent AARP study found. But many don’t report these crimes. “Almost nobody ever hears of a victim receiving justice,” Stokes says. “People want to see something done to address the fraud crisis.”